Father Ferro confesses to killing Bonafé and turns himself in

Father Ferro confesses to killing Honorato Bonafé and asks Lorenzo Quart to hand him over to the police, but his admission does not resolve the church’s other deaths or fully explain Bonafé’s final hours. The confession makes Ferro’s own words decisive while leaving the physical evidence, the motive, and the distinction between responsibility and proof troublingly incomplete.

The confession

At the Guadalquivir, Quart tries to offer help, but Ferro rejects the possibility of an alibi or supporting testimony. He says that when he closed the sacristy door, Bonafé was already dead inside the confessional. Asked how he can be certain, Ferro answers plainly that he killed him, then tells Quart it is time to deliver him to the police. His statement is both an admission and a request for surrender: rather than ask Quart to protect him, Ferro directs him toward the authorities.

The moment unsettles those present. Macarena turns away, suppressing a cry, while Pencho Gavira lights another cigarette. Ferro rises and buttons his cassock with clumsy fingers. His abrupt movement from confession to practical instruction gives the admission the force of an act: he does not merely disclose guilt but insists that it have a consequence.

What the police can establish

Ferro signs a statement at the police station affirming that he killed Bonafé. According to Simeón Navajo, however, Ferro gives almost no further account, answering yes or no or remaining silent on his lawyer’s advice. When questioned about the deaths of Peñuelas and Padre Urbizu, he neither confirms nor denies responsibility. His confession therefore closes one question only provisionally; it also requires the police to reopen two cases they had treated as accidents.

Navajo reconstructs Bonafé’s death from the scene and the available evidence, not from a detailed confession. He believes Bonafé was on the scaffolding beside the Virgin statue in the main altar when Ferro climbed up after him. The two may have argued or struggled; Bonafé fell, or was pushed, from a height of five metres. A wound across his hand suggests he tried to catch himself on a scaffold screw. Still alive after the fall, he crawled several metres, could not walk, and dragged himself into the nearest shelter: the confessional, where he died. Navajo’s hand gestures trace the route on his desk, making the church’s furnishings stand in for a scaffold and a death scene.

The body had first been discovered with its feet protruding from the open confessional. A blue canvas covered most of it, but one upturned hand remained visible, cut from wrist to index finger and yellowed like old wax. That wound fits Navajo’s later account of an attempted grip on the scaffolding, though his reconstruction retains alternatives: Bonafé may have fallen or been pushed, and the two men may have argued or fought. The physical narrative is persuasive without being complete.

Motive and the missing account

Navajo proposes that Bonafé had discovered the substitution of the Virgin’s pearls and went to the church to confirm that the displayed pearls were imitations. A possible attempt at blackmail may have followed; alternatively, Navajo suggests, Ferro may have surprised him before he could make his demand. The priest’s confession confirms the killing but does not confirm this proposed motive or the precise sequence of events.

The pearl investigation supplies a possible financial context. Evidence points to Francisco Montegrifo, the Madrid dealer previously connected to Ferro’s irregular sale of an altarpiece, as an intermediary in the circulation of Captain Xaloc’s pearls. A police informant’s account of the pearls’ timing coincides with renewed repair work at the church. Suppliers told Navajo’s investigators that the building materials and rented machinery cost more than could be covered by Ferro’s salary and the church’s donations. These facts give the suspected substitution and the church’s repairs a plausible connection, but they do not prove that Ferro sold the pearls, that Bonafé confronted him over them, or that blackmail precipitated the killing.

Navajo’s theory continues beyond the death itself: he supposes that Ferro locked the sacristy door, spent a couple of hours in the tower of Casa del Postigo reflecting, and then disappeared for a day. Ferro refuses to explain that disappearance. Quart, for his part, does not fill the gaps in Navajo’s account, leaving the police officer disappointed in the help he has received. The official theory thus remains a reconstruction assembled from physical clues and financial circumstances, not a full narrative supplied by the confessed killer.

The earlier deaths remain unresolved

Ferro’s confession throws new uncertainty over the deaths previously attributed to accidents. The archbishop had described Peñuelas’s fatal fall as bad luck: the municipal architect, appointed to prepare a report on the church’s unsafe condition, had argued with Ferro, then fell when a wooden scaffold railing gave way. He landed on a metal pipe that was being installed. Another official and Óscar Lobato were present, and Lobato administered the last rites. That account identified danger at the church and a conflict between Peñuelas and Ferro, but did not establish deliberate violence.

The account of Urbizu’s death was also circumstantial. There were no witnesses. Police thought that a scaffold had shifted, dislodging a large piece of plaster from the cornice; the piece, weighing more than ten kilograms, struck Urbizu on the head. The incident could have resulted from an accidental movement of the scaffold and already-loose plaster. Navajo had called it another case of bad luck. After Ferro’s confession, however, the priest’s refusal either to claim or deny responsibility prevents those explanations from being treated as final. The available material does not show that he killed either man.

Consequences and significance

The confession changes the status of the investigation without delivering certainty. Bonafé’s death is no longer merely a mystery: Ferro signs a statement taking responsibility for it, and Navajo’s reconstruction offers a plausible route from the altar scaffolding to the confessional. Yet the priest’s silence leaves motive, the exact manner of the fall, and the hours after the sacristy door was closed unsettled. His refusal to address the other two deaths turns what had seemed like settled accidents back into open cases.

Ferro’s action also contrasts with his earlier understanding of priestly duty. He had spoken of his obligation to defend the church because people who came to it possessed faith and needed its consolation. Now he does not ask Quart to preserve his reputation or devise a defense; he asks to be handed over. But his admission cannot by itself resolve every question raised by the evidence. The act of confession makes him answerable for Bonafé’s death while leaving the reader and the police to distinguish what he has stated from what remains inferred.